EsmondBradley
Martin

He uncovered the wildlife trade with a novel idea: follow the people.

B. 1941

BY CHARLES HOMANS

The house where Esmond Bradley Martin was murdered — stabbed to death one afternoon in February, in a still-unsolved killing apparently linked to a property dispute — was always an object of local curiosity. Hidden behind a wrought-iron gate topped with an “M,” on a forested property overrun with antelopes, warthogs and hyraxes in Nairobi’s Langata district, it radiated an enigmatic aristocracy. More than one guest compared its French-doored verandas and brightly painted sitting rooms to something out of “Gone with the Wind” — though in fact its stone architecture was 18th-century Georgian, the antique furniture French and Italian. Martin and his wife, Chryssee, had the house built to their specifications in the 1970s. It was a purposefully time-warped anachronism, like its owner.

Martin arrived in Kenya in the 1960s as a sort of 19th-century-style gentleman scholar, underwritten by a 19th-century fortune: His great-grandfather, Henry Phipps Jr., was Andrew Carnegie’s business partner, and Martin grew up partly on his family’s 40-room estate on Long Island’s Gold Coast. “The way he was brought up was entirely different,” Chryssee says. “He lived a very old-fashioned type of life.” He had the mannered, patrician eccentricities of a Wes Anderson character: a dandelion shock of hair that had gone snow white by middle age, tailored suits — from Dunhill in New York and later Savile Row shops — that he wore even when he was doing fieldwork in Yemeni souks or Laotian night markets. (When climate or circumstances demanded otherwise, he at least accessorized with a silk handkerchief.) His fastidiousness suggested a hermetic life that was the opposite of the one he lived.

Kitty
O’Neil

She overcame tragedy by daring anything and outrunning everything.

B. 1946

BY MICHAEL PATERNITI

The very first stunt performed by Kitty O’Neil — or at least the first one she could remember — came when she was 4 years old. In the upper reaches of her grandparents’ Texas mansion, she climbed through the trap door of a laundry chute, hovering between brightness and the dark industrial maw, then simply let go. We must imagine the child’s excitement, picking up speed as she drops, the adrenalized feeling of velocity and acceleration, of near-free-fall, and then, energetic bundle that she is, shooting back into the light, in a blur, the dirty laundry acting as an airbag, the yelp of joy as she lands on earth again.

From the start, there was nothing illicit about O’Neil’s daredevilry. (Her mother, in fact, gave permission for the laundry-chute drops.) She lived her life — all the many lives in one — in a constant blur. It was her superpower, this blur, and it’s what drove her from place to place, lover to lover, world record to record, stunt to stunt. Even in her baby picture, you can see it: from the optical illusion of white mist around the moon-faced child, those dark eyes, ovoid and aglitter, reaching through and beyond the lens, her spirit already in fast forward.

Michael Paterniti is a contributing writer for the magazine and a GQ correspondent. His forthcoming book, “Ninety or Nothing,” is about an attempt to reach the North Pole.

Sylvain
Bromberger

On June 22, 1940, a 15-year-old Belgian Jew named Sylvain Bromberger and his family found themselves in a crowd of fellow refugees in front of the Portuguese consulate in Bayonne, France. They fled to France the month before, shortly after Germany’s surprise attack on Belgium. But now France had surrendered to Hitler, and Bayonne, too, would soon be occupied by German forces. The Brombergers were desperate to acquire visas that would allow them to travel to Portugal. The situation, however, did not look promising. “I can still feel our fear and despair,” Bromberger recalled nearly 60 years later. “The line ahead of us seemed impossibly long, did not seem to move, and the Germans were presumably on their way.”

Then something unexpected happened. The refugees’ passports were gathered up en masse, taken into the consulate and stamped with the necessary visas. With this paperwork in hand, the Brombergers were able to reach Portugal safely. From there they obtained passage on a ship bound for New York City, which would become their new home. Five years later, as an infantryman in the United States Army, Bromberger returned to Europe for the invasion of Germany, where he reckoned firsthand with the fate that he and his family narrowly avoided.

James Ryerson is a senior staff editor for The Times’s Op-Ed page and the Ivory Tower columnist for the Book Review.

Nobukazu
Kuriki

His greatest triumph was failing to reach the summit of Everest, again and again.

B. 1982

BY DANIEL FROMSON

For Nobukazu Kuriki, the mountaintop was forever just out of reach. “I can see the summit,” he said in Japanese, in a video recorded in 2012, during his fourth unsuccessful attempt to climb Mount Everest. “I’m scared.” He swung the camera around to face himself: 30 years old and a slim 5-foot-4, alone in a field of crevasses, grimacing and breathing raggedly, with no oxygen tank, as his boots thudded into fresh snow.

Kuriki had reason to be afraid. It was autumn, a vicious and unpredictable time of year. He later encountered winds so strong that he was blown off the ground. When he tried to descend, he was trapped by a storm. Awaiting a rescue team, he huddled behind a rock close to the summit, enduring subzero cold for nearly two days. And yet what might seem suicidal to some was to him an adventure to be shared, via online videos and social media. His project was less about titanic success than the poetic confrontation of all-too-human failure, in which he managed to find great joy.

Otis
Rush

He set the standard for the slow blues — in his minor-key life as well as his music.

B. 1935

BY CARLO ROTELLA

The song begins with a great resonating shout of joy and pain that resolves into the word “Well,” swooping down from a soaring A flat to E flat. “I can’t quit you, baby,” the singer continues, the band entering with a crashing seventh chord, “but I got to put you down for a while.”

It’s one of the most potent blues voices of all time, holding and bending notes with equal parts barroom ardor and churchy conviction. You can hear Mississippi and Chicago in that voice, elegance and passion, a uniquely intense staging of the essential blues drama of tension and release.

Carlo Rotella is the director of American studies at Boston College. His next book, “The World Is Always Coming to an End,” will be published in April.

Madeleine
Kamman

She championed ‘the great cooking of the women of France.’

B. 1931

BY DANIEL DUANE

Hot pancakes stuffed with mountain ham and porcini mushrooms, nettle soup with sweet leeks and cream — these are among Madeleine Kamman’s taste memories from a solo trip to the French Alps at the age of 8, evoked decades later in her classic memoir, “When French Women Cook.” The year, she tells us, is 1939. The Nazis have invaded Poland and, with winter coming on, war has broken out across Europe. Kamman’s parents, in Paris and fearing for her safety, have arranged for Kamman to spend a year at a children’s camp where she has previously gone in summer. Kamman steps off the train alone in Annecy, where cold creeks burble between stone houses. The camp has sent a gangly local girl to greet Kamman — Mimi, “no more than 14,” Kamman writes, “broad shouldered with an olive complexion and the two most expressive and lovely brown eyes I have ever known.”

Kamman describes Mimi’s family home, across the road from the camp, as an old stone farmhouse where the cows residing in a ground-floor barn help to warm the bedrooms above. The kitchen has a wood-burning hearth where Mimi’s beautiful mother braises rabbit in red wine. Between blizzards and bright blue mornings, Kamman and Mimi become dear friends. They ride sleighs on white fields, bake egg-dough breads stuffed with pork cracklings to dip in hot Beaufort cheese melted with wine and garlic. For Christmas dinner, Mimi’s father shoots quail.

Daniel Duane is the author of the climbing memoir “Lighting Out: A Golden Year in Yosemite and the West.”

Jeannette and her husband, Joe, in the ’30s in Harlem.From Angela Hadley Brown

Gertrude
Jeannette

Her impediment ensured her success.

B. 1914

BY ELIZABETH McCRACKEN

In some ways you could trace everything back to the stutter.

In 1933, Gertrude Hadley ran away from her Arkansas home with a former prizefighter named Joe Jeannette II, who’d shown up at her high school prom. First they went to Hot Springs, where they married, and then St. Louis, and finally New York City. Her father, Willis Hadley, was a teacher and wanted her to go to college in Tennessee; he threatened to come with his shotgun to confront his new son-in-law. Then he decided that his daughter had made her bed and must lie in it.

Elizabeth McCracken is an author whose novel, “Bowlaway,” will be published in February.

Vic
Damone

He managed to escape the mob’s shadow, but not Sinatra’s.

B. 1928

BY ANTHONY GIARDINA

If, in the post-World War II era, the years before “The Voice” and “America’s Got Talent,” you wanted to make it as a pop singer, you appeared on radio shows like “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” If you did well enough, bookings followed, at small clubs, and, in time, recording contracts. If you were a stunningly handsome young baritone like Vito Farinola, you might be asked to change your name to something with more of an up-tempo swing to it — “Vic Damone,” in his case. But that was as much Americanization as was required. Thanks to the postwar ascent of a number of popular Italian-American singers — Sinatra, Bennett, Dean Martin, Perry Como — pop music had taken on a distinctly Neapolitan flavor. The songs Damone was handed at Mercury Records in the late ’40s, chart-toppers like “I Have But One Heart” and “You’re Breaking My Heart,” were reboots (with English lyrics added) of the Italian songs Damone’s immigrant father had played around the house. At the beginning, it must have seemed as if it was all going to be smooth sailing.

But there was another, more complicated way that Southern Italy maintained a grip on the postwar music industry. As soon as he established himself on the pop charts, Damone moved on to bigger nightclubs like the Copacabana in New York, the Flamingo in Las Vegas, the Beachcomber in Miami Beach — “classy” joints whose proprietorship was never in doubt. “If you were an entertainer in those days, you automatically performed at Mob-owned places,” Damone wrote in his autobiography. “There weren’t that many other clubs for you to go to.” And from those favored by the Mob, much was expected. When, as a very young man, Damone broke his engagement to a mobster’s daughter (for a very good reason: She balked at accepting his mother’s recipe for manicotti), he found himself dangling headfirst out a 14th-floor window, his feet held by the girl’s enraged father. His life was spared when the New York Mob’s “Prime Minister,” Frank Costello, gave him the classic thumbs-up at a meeting set to decide the issue. But the threat didn’t go away. More than a decade later, Robert Kennedy approached Damone at Peter Lawford’s house to get information on his jilted fiancée’s father. The singer offered nothing. How could he? These guys were omnipresent. Frank Sinatra, at his own career peak, responded to Damone’s plea for business advice by passing the phone to his houseguest, Sam Giancana: Vic, talk to Sam. And so it went.

Anthony Giardina is a writer whose most recent play, “Dan Cody’s Yacht,” had its premiere at the Manhattan Theater Club last spring.

Margot
Kidder

Margot Kidder’s only child, Maggie McGuane, wasn’t sure she wanted to talk with me. Margot died in May, when, her manager said, she was found having passed peacefully in her sleep. But a few months later, the coroner’s office released a statement that Margot died from “a self-inflicted drug and alcohol overdose” — a suicide. A fuller report said that she was “well-known to law enforcement as relating to drug and alcohol issues.” Maggie spoke to the media for the first time then. “It’s a big relief that the truth is out there,” she told The Associated Press. “It’s important to be open and honest so there’s not a cloud of shame in dealing with this.” She didn’t speak publicly about her mother again.

Maggie isn’t particularly private, she told me on the phone. It’s just that she wasn’t quite sure what to say. It was hard to live in the same town as Margot had (Livingston, Mont.) and hear people repeat the old myths about her own mother. Should her mother be remembered how her mother wanted to be remembered — as a woman who was somehow able to be an accomplished actress, a loving mother, a dedicated activist and a doting grandmother? Should her mother be remembered as she actually was? Could Maggie tell the truth about how difficult it had always been with Margot — aren’t you always supposed to lie a little in these end-of-the-year tributes? Who is in charge of a person’s memory? We’ve collectively agreed that in our in memoriams a person’s harder edges are sanded down. But is that the right thing to do? Which is the actual tribute? Maybe, she thought, it was best not to talk about it at all.

Bob
Dorough

GEORGE NEWALL,copy chief for the advertising firm McCaffrey and McCall, which represented ABC in the early ’70s: “Bob was a semi-legend among jazz musicians, but he wasn’t known to the general public at all. We met because he had a partner named Ben Tucker who played bass at the Hickory House in New York, and I would go in every night. My boss, David McCall, had tried to find some composers who could put the multiplication tables to music. I asked Ben, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, my partner, Bob Dorough — he can put anything to music!’ He told me Bob had written a song based on the words on the mattress tag that say, ‘Do not remove under penalty of law.’ So I brought Bob in, and David gave him the assignment. He came back about two weeks later with ‘Three Is a Magic Number,’ and we were all knocked out by it.”

MICHAEL EISNER,then the president of children’s programming at ABC: “I was made head of children’s television at a time when the F.C.C. was really critical of the kind of television people were making for children. Very soon after I got that job, McCaffrey and McCall called me out of the blue and said, We have an idea for television. I said fine. I had zero expectations. I thought it would be a complete waste of time.”

Devah
Pager

Her work as a sociologist highlighted racial injustice in the United States.

B. 1972

BY MATTHEW DESMOND

For a high school class called Ideas in Western Literature, Devah Pager and her classmates designed a social experiment to test a cultural assumption. They sent male and female classmates — separately, then together — to knock on doors and ask for money with a story that they had run out of gas. Social scientists use this approach, referred to as an audit study, to test for discrimination. Holding everything else constant, the students wanted to see if boys, girls or couples received more money. Years later, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Pager would design another audit study, one that would produce among the most resonant sociological findings of a generation.

Pager grew up in Honolulu, in a one-story home whose doors were rarely locked. “Living in Hawaii I have taken in some beautiful colors,” Pager wrote in her college-application essay. “The colors which have influenced me the most are those inside the people here, with all the different races and cultures.” But when Pager moved to the mainland to attend U.C.L.A., she confronted a racially divided city. “When you grow up with that being normal,” Pager once remarked about Hawaii’s multiculturalism, “everything else seems strange — and wrong.”

Matthew Desmond is a contributing writer for the magazine and a professor of sociology at Princeton. His last book was “Evicted.”

Ntozake
Shange

An electrifying poet who forged a language for women’s untold stories.

B. 1948

BY REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS

It was a few months before my 21st birthday, and again I found myself in solitary confinement, in a cell that I could cross in seven steps, a walk I had made for a month’s worth of hours. In the afternoons, the correctional officer would come into the cell block and circle the 40-odd cells, opening the small rectangular tray window and dropping mail into the rooms of the lucky among us. When the guard placed Ntozake Shange’s “nappy edges” through the slot, the electric blue cover became the only color in the vast, cold whiteness of that cell.

About a year earlier, in a different cell in a different hole, I decided to become a poet; “nappy edges” was just the second collection of poetry I owned, purchased after 23 cents an hour multiplied to cover a paperback and shipping and handling. Shange turned a cell barely big enough to live in into a walking tour of the world. She pulled in Marcus Garvey, Toussaint L’Ouverture, misogyny, Bessie Smith and dozens of musicians. She taught me that poems don’t have to follow rules and wrote with the kind of spelling that only Twitter or texting gives intelligent people permission to deploy today. She wrote of the grit, funk and troubles. In “my father is a retired magician,” Shange writes of a father’s response to a child whose third-grade classmate wanted to be made white on the spot: “what cd any self-respectin colored american magician/do wit such a outlandish request/cept//put all them razzamatazz hocus pocus zippity-do-dah//thingamajigs away cuz//colored chirren believing in magic//waz becomin politically dangerous for the race.” She unabashedly sang in the slang of my family, sounding like my Aunt Pandora and Aunt Violet loud-talking when they imagined we weren’t listening.

Six Artists on the Portraits They Made of Those We Lost

The cover portrait captures her midsong. She let her voice spring forth with such freedom and vulnerabilty — there are performances from the ’70s where the way she would sing while playing the piano was just unreal. She’s sounding almost, at some points, like she couldn’t control it. I wanted us to feel that.Artwork and words by Toyin Ojih Odutola

Tom WolfeB. 1930(High-Style Wordsmith)The whole thing has a kind of mysterious, otherworldly characteristic, because the one thing about Tom is that he had an arcane idea of what his appearance should be. He didn’t look like anybody else.Artwork and words by Milton Glaser

Kate spadeB. 1962(Empress of Handbags)

I found this woman to be very beautiful, and her story very touching. We were almost the same age. I felt a lot of empathy for her. Her eyes, her gaze, were the most interesting to me. They are the reflection of her soul. Artwork and words by Nathalie Boutté

Anthony BourdainB. 1956(Worldly Chef)

I didn’t want to do a memento mori. Many millions of people knew him from his shows and felt a sense of loss when he died. That’s something I wanted to do justice to, and make peace with, in the portrait. A genuine admiration, without any silliness or caricature. I wanted to get the smile right. Artwork and words by Raymond Pettibon

Stan LeeB. 1922(Comics Colossus)

I know everybody just thought that he was going to go forever, because he acted as if he were going to. But he was still a human being. Stan was a national treasure, so I used a style sort of like what you would see on a dollar bill. He has his place in history. Artwork and words by Todd McFarlane

Mac MillerB. 1992(Sensitive Rapper)

There’s this blasé attitude that rappers can have, but he just seemed to be focused on the music, as opposed to the pageantry of celebrity life. I wanted to capture that humanness, that raw quality, and do something celebratory, not particularly sad. Weirdly, last night, he came to me in a dream and gave me a hug. It was a nice validation. Artwork and words by Danny Ferrell

Linda BrownB. 1943(Desegregation Trailblazer)

A lot of pressure is put on little black girls. So in order to make her very powerful, I added two Muhammad Ali fists in front of her, because she and her family were really knocking down barriers at that time. They’re a symbol of power, a symbol of resistance, and also just of owing nothing to anyone but yourself. Brown v. Board of Education changed the world. Artwork and words by Deborah Roberts

Dick Tuck (center) with Frederick Dutton (left) and Hunter S. Thompson in the early 1970s.Lee Goff

Dick
Tuck

He lived to harass Richard Nixon — and helped create the topsy-turvy political world we now inhabit.

B. 1924

BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS

An old Trivial Pursuit card asked the question “What Democratic prankster waved the train out of the station while Richard Nixon spoke from the caboose?” The answer: Dick Tuck. The story has been slightly exaggerated — Tuck, the infamous political consultant and campaign-trail chaos agent, tried to give Nixon a premature send-off, but the train stayed put. This did not stop Tuck, a print-the-legend kind of guy, from carrying the game card in his wallet, a trophy of hard-earned infamy. Born in Hayden, Ariz., in 1924, Tuck lived many lives. He disposed of bombs for the United States Marine Corps and served as the politics editor of National Lampoon; he was at Robert F. Kennedy’s side when Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. But he’s best known as a consummate political jokester who lived rent-free, for decades, in the head of Richard Milhous Nixon.

The two met for the first time in California in 1950, when Nixon was running a nasty, Red-baiting senatorial campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas and Tuck was a student on the G.I. Bill at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A professor who knew of Tuck’s interest in politics — but didn’t realize he was a Democrat — asked him to serve as advance man for a Nixon appearance on campus. Tuck was happy to oblige. He booked Nixon into the largest lecture hall available and barely publicized the event; the 20-odd people who showed up watched Tuck deliberately fumble his opening remarks before announcing that Nixon was here to say a few words about the International Monetary Fund.

Alex Pappademas is the former executive editor of MTV News and a contributor to The Times, GQ, Grantland and Esquire.

Ann
Hopkins

He was her mentor at Price Waterhouse, one of the country’s biggest accounting firms. He offered this advice when she was trying to make partner: “Walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear makeup and jewelry. Have your hair styled.”

It was 1982. Hopkins thought her mentor, Tom Beyer, meant well. There were only seven female partners at the 622-partner firm, and she was the sole woman, among 88 candidates, being considered to join them that year. Still, she thought Beyer was talking nonsense. She had the trust of clients and close colleagues. And she had helped bring in the largest deal in Price Waterhouse’s history: a State Department contract worth up to $50 million.

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the magazine and the Truman Capote fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School. Her new book, “Charged,” will be published in April.

Dwight
Clark

The play that led to the pass that led to The Catch was called Sprint Right Option. The primary target was the speedy Freddie Solomon; the second was Dwight Clark, a wide receiver no one except the San Francisco 49ers’ coach, Bill Walsh, thought could be an N.F.L. star. The Clark option rarely worked in practice — Joe Montana would throw the ball too high or too low. Targeting Solomon was typically a better bet, except in the last minute of the fourth quarter on that chilly January night at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, when Solomon slipped on the soggy grass.

It was 1982, and the San Francisco 49ers were still “lovable losers destined to break your heart,” recalls the longtime sportswriter and N.F.L. Network analyst Michael Silver, who grew up a 49ers fan. The Dallas Cowboys, the 49ers’ opponent in that night’s N.F.C. championship game, had dominated the previous decade and reeked of the imperiousness that came with being anointed “America’s Team.”

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College and a contributing writer for the magazine.

Ms.
Colombia

The year was 1993, and Councilman Daniel Dromm was nervous. He was waiting at the intersection of 37th Avenue and 89th Street in Jackson Heights for the inaugural Queens Pride Parade to start. No borough outside Manhattan had ever held its own pride parade. “We were trying to show the neighborhood that we were your friends, family and neighbors,” he remembered. But the streets were empty, save for some oblivious pedestrians and bikers.

His anxiety got the best of him, and he ran inside a friend’s apartment to steady himself. By the time he got back outside, a raucous crowd had gathered. Dromm, who was then a teacher, heard cheers and clapping, and as he got closer, the source of their delight came into focus: Ms. Colombia, né José Oswaldo Gómez, decked out in one of her signature flouncy dresses, her beard resembling a Day-Glo snow cone. All eyes were on her. “She had a big ol’ banana in her hands, and she was peeling it slowly and suggestively to get every laugh she could out of it.” It wasn’t exactly the message Dromm hoped to send with the parade. “But it was hysterical. When she finished, she gobbled it down, and the parade started.”

Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine and co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.”

Anne V.
Coates

Film editing is an art of decisions: Which shot, which take, when and for how long? It’s sifting and sorting. It’s dexterity, detection, discernment, endurance. But it’s easy to take for granted. Credit and blame go to the author of the thing you see, not the person who made it better or who rescued it from being worse. It’s a craft with a modesty credo. Sometimes, though, there’s editing that seduces you into responding to it. Anne V. Coates was one of those editors whose work you noticed, not necessarily because she wanted you to, but because her work was special.

Coates won an Oscar, in 1963, for turning more than 30 miles of film into “Lawrence of Arabia.” (She had four other nominations and an honorary Oscar too.) Maybe you see that 30 number and think, Wow, this lady basically ran an ultramarathon — with her eyes and hands! Maybe you assume the achievement is in the taming of all that footage and the variations contained within. And sure: That is editing.

Wesley Morris is a staff writer for the magazine, a critic at large for The New York Times and a co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.”

Rusty
Staub

The slugger who followed a code of honor — on and off the field.

B. 1944

BY ROB HOERBURGER

During a game, when he wasn’t playing, you could often find him scribbling in a red book, and that, as much as the sweet swing that was admired by no less than Ted Williams, was what helped keep him in the Major Leagues for so long. Decades before analytics became commonplace in baseball, Daniel Joseph (Rusty) Staub compiled the goods on every pitcher he faced in the batter’s box or observed from the top step of the dugout: patterns, windups, motions, a tap of a cleat, an eyebrow twitch, any idiosyncrasy or quirk that might tip a pitch. And he guarded that information, even from teammates it might have helped. “He only let me flip through it once,” said Keith Hernandez, his friend and New York Met teammate in the mid-1980s. “But he usually wouldn’t let me see it. He would say, ‘You didn’t earn it.’ ”

In other words, Rusty Staub had high standards, and by the end of his career, they’d led to some dazzling stats: 500 or more hits with four separate teams (the Houston Astros, Montreal Expos, Mets and Detroit Tigers), for a career total of 2,716; home runs swatted in his teens, 20s, 30s and 40s. And he applied those standards just as strictly off the field. A gourmet cook, he would serve dinner guests on Waterford crystal and Wedgwood china. Meals out often meant “coats and ties, suits,” at places like Le Cirque and the Russian Tea Room, Hernandez said, where “he knew all the chefs.” In postgame interviews, he could sound like an English teacher, and would genially linger over the interviewer’s name — “the thing about that play, Ralph” — as if to say, “I respect you, I only expect the same in return.”

Rob Hoerburger is the copy chief of the magazine. His first novel, “Why Do Birds,” will be published in March.

Henry Adalid
Reyes Díaz

At 5 a.m. on most days, Henry Adalid Reyes Díaz popped out of bed, dressed and walked outside into the darkness. He strapped bags filled with plastic goods like drinking cups and wash basins onto his back, and set off walking on the unpaved roads that connect his village outside Tegucigalpa to others just like it in Honduras, hoping to make a few sales. After he returned home in the afternoons, the rest of Henry’s days were consumed by running errands, not for himself, but for others: an elderly neighbor who had run out of firewood; a new mother who couldn’t leave home to buy groceries; a sick friend who needed help getting to the doctor.

Kids in the neighborhood called Henry Papá Makano, after a Panamanian reggaeton star who styled his hair the same way, spiked with gel. They would butter Henry up before asking him for money to buy an ice cream or a piece of candy. Henry’s Aunt Leticia, who raised him, would ask why he always obliged, even when it left him with nothing. “We’re only passing through this life,” he would tell her. And besides, the lempiras he gave away were worth only about 4 American cents. It felt impossible — not to mention pointless — to save a few pennies at a time.

Caitlin Dickerson is a national reporter for The Times covering immigration.

Aiko Herzig
Yoshinaga

From deep in the archives, she brought justice for Japanese-Americans.

B. 1924

BY MAGGIE JONES

Aiko Yoshinaga was 17 when her high school principal called her and 14 other Japanese-American students into his office. It was April 1942 in Los Angeles. Yoshinaga was an honors student, two months from graduating, with dreams of college and becoming a dancer and a singer. The principal had other ideas. “You don’t deserve to get your high school diplomas,” Yoshinaga recalled him saying, “because your people bombed Pearl Harbor.”

Earlier that year President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, creating the path to imprison more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans who lived on the West Coast. Government officials would claim it was a “military necessity” to create “internment camps,” as they were known. Some military leaders used perkier euphemisms: “relocation centers,” “wayside stations,” “temporary homes,” “havens of rest and security.”

David
Buckel

An environmentalist who came to see his own existence as unjust.

B. 1957

BY JESSE BARRON

When David Buckel, the human rights lawyer and environmentalist, burned himself to death in Prospect Park in Brooklyn around 6 a.m. on April 14, there were no witnesses and no recordings. A passer-by saw the smoke and reported it to the police as a brush fire. Near the body, in an otherwise-empty garbage bag inside a shopping cart, officers found an envelope containing a 1,276-word letter, which Buckel had also sent to several newspapers. The letter said that his “early death by fossil fuel” — referring to the gasoline with which he had started the fire — “reflects what we are doing to ourselves” by ignoring climate change. Buckel explained that his privilege had come to outweigh any benefit that he was providing to the earth. “After long years of effort,” he wrote, “it may be clear that staying in the world is doing more harm than good. ... A lifetime of service may best be preserved by giving a life.”

Buckel, the fourth of five brothers, grew up in upstate New York. His eldest sibling raised hogs and calves, and Buckel would name the animals; he called one cow King. When he was around 6, he came home one day to find that King was gone. The freezer was full of meat. He didn’t speak to his brother for three weeks. Buckel was quiet and grave, and took things seriously even for a child. The same brother remembers Buckel’s biking furiously through “snow drifts as tall as he was” on his paper route, refusing every offer of a ride.

Phyllis
Kind

She was frustrated. Her ambitions for an academic career were set aside, she had four small kids and she did not want to go back to substitute-teaching third graders. Her husband, an art historian, encouraged her to open a small gallery. “This is such a great idea,” she later recalled a friend saying. “Your husband knows everything, and you have such a great personality.” She herself wasn’t so sure: “I said, What, me run a store?” But this was the 1960s, and Phyllis Kind needed something to do.

At first, Kind’s Chicago gallery, Pro Grafica Arte, sold prints of famous works — her husband indeed knew everything about each of them — but she gave that up rather soon, along with her marriage not long after. Her career, and her very notion of who should be considered an artist, changed when she was introduced to a California psychologist who had held onto drawings made by one of his patients, Martín Ramírez.

Walter
Mischel

Picture a boy, 8 years old, assisting his parents in a strange and somber task. In their gracious home in Vienna, they are throwing family documents into the fireplace, trying to erase their Jewish identities in the flames. Hitler’s troops have just rolled through their streets to cheering crowds. Now the boy, about to throw another document into the fire, stops: This one has a gold seal and a photo affixed. The man in the photo, he learns when he shows it to his parents, is his maternal grandfather, who once lived in the United States. The document is a revelation, proof that he had become an American citizen before returning to Vienna, and it will be their salvation.

A flash of gold, a moment’s hesitation. A psychologist might analyze the story through the prisms associated with what researchers call positive life outcomes. The boy was intelligent. The boy’s family was well off at that point. What about the boy’s character? Was he distractible, his urgent task so easily interrupted by a shiny bit of foil? Or was it the opposite — was he a child who, even in a moment of panic, could pause, wait, show self-restraint?

Ed
Sadlowski

The Chicago steelworker who fought to unite the working class.

B. 1938

BY ALEX KOTLOWITZ

In 1977, at age 38, Ed Sadlowski, an unrepentant progressive, ran for the presidency of the 1.4-million-member United Steelworkers of America. It doesn’t sound like a big deal now, but it was a big deal back then, when organized labor still held the loyalty of America’s increasingly conservative working class. Sadlowski represented something new: a multiracial coalition of blacks, Mexicans and what were then called “white ethnics,” and he encouraged women to run for union positions. He understood the workers’ discontent and their alienation, their belief that they weren’t getting their fair share. But rather than stir up hostility toward others who were also struggling, he went after those in power — not just the steel company owners but also the stodgy union heads who were disconnected from their members. “I guess maybe I’m a romantic,” he told The New York Times early in the campaign, “but I look on the American labor movement as a holy crusade.”

Sadlowski grew up in South Chicago, a corner of the city then beholden to the multitude of steel behemoths belching smoke and sulfur along the Calumet River. Soon after he dropped out of high school, he went to work at U.S. Steel’s South Works, which was big enough to sponsor a softball league of 63 teams. He came by his work honestly; his father worked as a millwright at Inland Steel. Sadlowski’s first job was oiling the machinery, and so he earned the sobriquet “Oil Can Eddie,” which is how many referred to him long after he left the mills.

Alex Kotlowitz, who teaches at Northwestern University, is the author of four books including the forthcoming “An American Summer.”

Baby
Orca

Her mother refused to abandon her body, underscoring the species’ plight.

B. 2018

BY BROOKE JARVIS

She had grown, for a year and a half, in the belly of the whale that was her mother. But now, the day of departure had arrived. She would begin her new life backward, which is to say, in the usual way: tail-first, into cold water and a cloud of blood.

She rode to the surface on still-soft fins. Through the nostril on top of her head, she filled her lungs with air. The sky above was bright. Great, sleek bodies — her mother, her aunts, her brother, her cousins — swam playfully close, whistling and clicking their own underwater language. She was so new to the world that the white patches of her skin glowed orange-brown.